Teaching on youtube 16 December 2007
As much as I try to defend TEFL as a serious profession (for some), I’ve got to admit that most of us have it well easy compared to a secondary school French teacher:
…see here for a very realistic example.
I’ve been reading the Oxford ESOL Handbook recently (what can I say, it was one of those “press holidays” in Japan and I hadn’t brought a book and this one was lying at school…) and was very surprised to read that TESOL classes of immigrants make much slower progress than TEFL students. I’d always assumed it was the opposite and that those lucky TESOL teachers actually had students with a bit of motivation.
Even before I read that, it had seemed to me that the lesson plans and teaching ideas in the book all lacked the badabimbadaboom factor of a good TEFL lesson plan- they were all a bit slow moving and vague, perhaps because a TESOL teacher never knows when a much more important question about getting medicines from the doctor is going to come up and interrupt everything.
In the same way, I have great respect for the 1 year Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) in the UK (maybe due to great ignorance of it, but still…), but most of the things you need to cope with a class of British 15 year olds is just not needed with a group of Thai kids- and a CELTA qualified teacher in Thailand is likely to be teaching something that looks much more like a good lesson plan than the much more trained PGCE teacher/ crowd controller in the UK will be able to manage. So, it crowd control is not your idea of teaching, you know which one to choose. I chose life…
The writer’s own explanation for the slow progress of TESOL students, by the way, was TESOL teachers being unambitious for their students, which also makes a lot of sense.
And for any of you that made it right to the bottom, Catherine Tate doesn’t learn Shakespeare either.